Ampersand Gazette #27
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“Tough doesn’t work for me,” he said. “The way to prevent burnout is to embrace what you’re doing, live with it and tango dance with it. When you dance tango you have to feel the body of the other person, the movement, the emotion.”
from an article in The New York Times
“Cancer, My Husband’s Doctor, & Catherine Deneuve”
November 17, 2022
There’s a part of the collective American psyche that really believes whole-heartedly in tough. Tough it out we tell ourselves about a bad situation. You can do it—you’re tough enough. In more than six decades of life, I’ve had plenty of chances to consider toughness as a quality that I might want to cultivate in myself.
From this vantage point, I have to say, quite delightedly, that tough is over-rated. In fact, way over-rated. So now the pendulum has swung well across the aisle if you will, and so many of us lean in to our new relationships with our wounds.
We say, essentially, this is where I’m tender, and you have to take it into account when you deal with me. People announce their triggers willy-nilly these days.
I don’t think that’s the solution either.
I think from tough to triggered is a spectrum, even a seesaw, which we all would do well to explore and learn to navigate for ourselves. And before you get your knickers in a twist, I am not saying don’t be tough, and I am not saying don’t be triggered.
I was very blessed toward the end of 2022 to spend a great deal of time with Lauren Grace, the founder and host of the Afterlight podcast. Our conversations turned out to be so deep that she’s divided them into nine (yes, 9!) episodes for Afterlight.
One of those, which will air on March 29, 2023, was on The Witch Wound & The Chakras. According to my research and experience, most humans alive in the West today carry a piece or two of the witch wound.
If you’re having visions of Salem, yes, that’s part of it, but more, it’s the far more damaging (really) devastation of the spiritual power inherent in the feminine that has systematically, and systemically, been obliterated by millennia of church doctrine—created and established and upheld by those whose power it threatened.
Okay, okay, huff and puff and blow the house down if you must, but then … stop and listen. It’s partially our love affair with tough that has kept this wound in place for so long. And at the same time, for every instance in which we claim it as a trigger, we do little to heal it as well.
So, what’s a (possibly, former) witch to do?
First, acknowledge it. Say to yourself: This is.
Don’t interpret it. Don’t tell stories about it. Don’t fix it. Don’t heal it. Be with it. It is. It happened.
Second, remind yourself: That was then, this is now.
It’s not happening now. It happened. -ed, in the past. It only comes forward in time when we insist on centering it in our experience.
Third, dance with it, tango/tangle, be with it. Ask the wound itself what it needs from you now. (Not what it needed from you then.) Come into now with the issue.
Not tough. Not triggered. Present. Keep asking. What does it need now? And now? And now? Until whatever is needed soothes you into a new place with it.
That’s what real healing is. Yes, you were once wounded. Yes, the wound needed care. Yes, you cared enough to dance with it so you didn’t have to fall into the abyss, but instead so you could become more of who you truly are meant to be.
P.S. It works on the witch wound and any other kind as well.
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“Deborah writes: My parents gave me their old tea set. One of the cups has a broken handle. When I display it, I turn the broken handle to the wall. My daughter keeps moving the broken cup front and center. She says it reminds her of how her grandmother made her grandfather use that cup, because he was the one who broke it. Please order her to leave it be.
“I suppose there’s a version of this story in which your father was always humiliated by the broken cup. If so, I order your daughter to stop it. But really I don’t want to, as what she’s doing is hilarious, and more meaningful, narrative. That cup tells a story about your family. The rest are just dead fly collectors. I say you go ahead and keep trying to hide the broken parts of the past and accept that your daughter will keep revealing them. That’s a story about your family too. About all families, really.”
from The New York Times
“Judge John Hodgman on Hiding the Broken Parts of Our Past”
December 29. 2022
As a rule, I am not a particular fan of Judge John Hodgman, however, this was too juicy a tidbit to ignore. I agree with him. It is hilarious.
And the narrative is of supreme value to that family, and to all families.
Things, usually everyday things, often hold the narrative of a family. In fact, being in the position of the oldest living person in my family, I am surrounded by things that belonged to my great grandmother—her Foley food mill with which she made her own smooth cranberry sauce; my grandmother—her Christmas cookie tin that makes me smile every time I see it because I learned how to open it silently and steal cookies right out from under her nose; my mother—her hunt table that is the first antique she and my father ever bought together.
Each time I see these things, and many more throughout my home, I am a part of creating that narrative. Unlike those three women, I do not have my own children to carry on that story, but it doesn’t mean I don’t contribute to the collective story of humankind.
The Nazarene Rabbi was famous for saying, there is nothing hidden which shall not be revealed. Broken teacup handles, Foley food mills, cookie tins, tables, and all.
Isn’t it Leonard Cohen who said that the cracks are how the light gets in?
Where in your narrative is there a broken place, Beloved? Make a little time each day to invite the light into the broken place and discover what wonderful new storyline emerges.
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“If you look closely, you might start to see this wholesale somatic and psychic restructuring as a certain kind of Grace… not the sweet, sugary grace that is the favourite Instagram kind, but a grace that is fierce and wild and has a disassembling energy to it. It’s the grace of Kali, a raging grace, a creative and destructive reorganisation of consciousness.
“We all need some gentleness now. We all need some healing. We all need a rest. It starts with being kinder to yourself and then kinder to others, making the leap to trusting in life again. It can be so easy to lose track of your home base, whether imagined as the palace of the soul, the light of the spirit, or the ventral passageways of the holy human nervous system.
“Your wound is not pathology, it is path. It has something to show you that the unbroken could never reveal. If you will provide a holding space for the broken pieces to reassemble, they will reveal an unmet doorway.”
Lorna Bevan, master astrologer
from her Hare in the Moon forecast
January 1, 2023
And to go along with broken teacup handles … Lorna Bevan is one of my top two favorite astrologers. Her Hare in the Moon forecasts are stellar. This is an excerpt from one.
What I liked here is what I made bold. The grace of Kali. Kali is the Goddess as Destroyer in the Hindu pantheon of deities. She’s an avatar for the tarot card The Tower—a.k.a. The Fall of the House of God.
Sometimes, Beloved, like it or not, things have to be obliterated, destroyed, razed to the ground so we can start over. Madame Kali is our ever-present helper in just such endeavors. She takes no prisoners. When things need to go, She makes them go.
I have learned over the years to appreciate her deeply. Especially when I am holding on, often unreasonably.
And here, when things fall apart, as Buddhist nun Pema Chodron would say, is where and when we are given a choice. A deep choice, one that will affect the next steps in our lives. That choice is whether to center the tragedy in our stories.
If you stay focused on the destruction, Beloved, you will remain in the destruction. Do you need to mourn it? Of course. Do you need to honor it? Yes. Do you need to witness it? A thousand times yes.
And then, you and all the rest of us, need to raise your eyes, your heart, your mind, your spirit from the destruction, and gaze ahead. What’s next? is the right question.
This is Lorna’s prescient advice. When you center the destruction, you’re choosing wound as pathology, dear one. Do you really want that? I shouldn’t think so. Not as a long-term strategy.
When you lift your being from the focus on the destruction, then your wound becomes path.
Stay in the pathology for as long as you need to, Beloved. I mean it. But then when it’s time to move on, tell yourself Yes, I’ve been wounded. I honored it, and now? take your first of many baby steps into motion on your path.
Note that little conjunction in there—and. Ampersand living from within out at its very best.
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And in publishing news …
Well, truth? I have been on a decluttering rampage. Seriously, for a couple of months. It’s been in my heart to create a course based on Chakra Work to recognize and heal energy leaks. And as is always my practice, I put myself through the material first.
Talk about energy leaks! Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints, angels, and martyrs! I didn’t even begin to realize how much was draining my natural energy. Try these on for size:
Emails that I needed to unsubscribe from; papers that needed to be scanned and recycled; those same scans needed to be filed in their appropriate computer directories; unused folders, files, et al that needed deleting; cleaning up all my music files; old office supplies that had dried up or I no longer used. I’ll stop there, but assure you that I went through every cupboard, closet, drawer, under-bed, anywhere there were things, and I looked at them, made ruthless decisions, and tossed and donated like a fiend.
And I feel amazing now that it’s almost done.
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Usually what a decluttering frenzy means is that I’m getting ready to write again, and sure enough, I’ve gotten guidance to dive into two books at once! Never done that before although I’ve wanted to for a long time.
I plan to return to the eleventh of my Mex Mysteries. It’s called Shrew This! and it concerns a production of The Taming of the Shrew in a DV shelter. The people there have chosen the show for their annual fundraiser, and of course, our spiky little friend COVID raises its dubious head, so they have to accommodate that as well.
In addition, the second book of The Subversive Lovelies, my new historical fiction series, called Jasmine Increscent, is hollering at me. Jasmine is the Bailey sister who has had her own ministry to women in the dread ghetto of Five Points for many years. Her vice business is a markedly different kind of gaming hell called, tongue-in-cheek, The Boardroom. Ladies, and their guests only.
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A brief reminder … that the Inaugural Chakra Cohort is open for six elite students who wish to learn the system I use for my chakra work, and to develop their own. If there’s someone you think ought to consider it, please have them contact me here.
Starting mid-March, I’m thinking of creating a one-evening-a-week group to do shared chakra work together. Please contact me to let me know your interest.
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The Chakra Correspondence Compendium is very close to posting on my Patreon. I’m working out the last of the technical kinks, and hope to have it up by the next Gazette.
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If you are also a subscriber to Seeds, my weekly spiritual email which has gone out Friday after Friday and is in its 25th year, I am working toward creating an app that would put all of these inspirational mini-essays at your fingertips. If you know of a really good app template, do drop me a line. The one I’m seeking is like the one used by The Poetry Foundation.
In addition, I am planning an Annual of Seeds—a perennial book to give you one per day for keeps. Stay tuned.
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If you are making New Year Resolutions this year, please visit my public offerings on LinkedIn, Medium, or Patreon to learn a new and wondrous way called The Wise Whys to make just such promises to yourself.
In the meantime, a blessed 2023 to you and yours, and be Ampersand until next time.
S.